4. Reporting

5. Interacting

Interacting with team members and stakeholders to facilitate, encourage and moderate.

What is a successful project?

A successful project delivers the right outputs on time.

At the end of a successful project, the team is still improving and is ready to take on another project.

At the end of a successful project, we have learned something and improved how we define, discover, plan, report and interact.

How do projects fail?

A project that produces no output or produces the wrong output is a failure. Examples include products that get returned or software that causes problems for the customer.

A project that consumes excessive resources is a failure. A project that does not deliver results in time to be useful or valuable is also a failure.

A project that ends with a burnt out team who cannot take on another project is a failure.

How to head off failure?

Choose and keep the right team. Select people who have needed skills and are good at being part of a team. Remove people who don’t get along with the team.

Limit the scope of the project. Put your job on the line to keep the project down to a manageable size. Break the project into phases to limit the scope of the current work.

Verify correctness of the outputs with the customer. Check the requirements with the stakeholders at the beginning, and verify regularly that what has been done is still needed and expected by the stakeholders.

Iterate at regular intervals. Deliver workable parts of the output in small increments and then re-check the scope and priorities for the next increment.

Listen carefully at all times. Don’t presume anything without verifying it yourself. Tell people when they’re doing something right.